CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@baldur did you have your own darkroom and developed these yourself?

It has been a good long while since I looked at Tukey, but what I took away from his body of work back then (setting the FFT algorithm aside) is that even the simplest tools can be used to reveal a lot about data (which he then amply illustrated in that book you display, e.g. stem-leaf plots). Just like Tufte, he does not strike me as the sort who'd surrender his capability to think and make sense of things to the computer.

@kbob I don't know how appealing it would be to non-specialists, but let me just say that it's one of the books I read because I really like reading it (e.g. I'd read it before bedtime), as opposed to just needing to refer to it for an application (though I've done that for this book, too).

@docpop good grief, these dudes are definitely telling on themselves. If they can't find the time or means to vet everything they've written, why should we spend the time or means reading their crap?

(See also: https://bsky.app/profile/manigarm.bsky.social/post/3mm2g7372yc2o )

@cammerman indeed, those were very... interesting times.

@nxskok I find that Acton is a little like Velvel Kahan (he of IEEE floating point standard fame) or Edsger Dijkstra: you don't always have to agree with what they wrote, but you should at least give them some serious thought.

@heptapodEnthusiast regarding the lipid rafts, there is in fact a (relatively recent) paper that posits this theory: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004259117 . Perhaps you've seen it already? (cc. @johncarlosbaez)

@maxpool I noted this in a different response to this thread, but for what little we know about how inhalational anesthetics work, we at least know that the more lipophilic (that is, how well they dissolve in fats) they are, the more potent their effect is; for the noble gases, this is then also correlated with their atomic polarizability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizability). So, helium, neon, and argon display almost no anesthetic activity, but krypton and xenon do. In fact, argon will only display anesthetic activity at hyperbaric (pressure greater than atmospheric pressure) conditions, where its solubility in fats is enhanced. See the survey of Winkler and others, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pharmthera.2016.02.002 and https://doi.org/10.3390/oxygen4040026 . (cc. @johncarlosbaez @heptapodEnthusiast)

@johncarlosbaez @djm62 I got the joke ;), but possibly contaminating the water table with chloroform can be problematic, and people actually are concerned about chloroform contamination in drinking water. This is because chloroform is often a product of the chlorine used to disinfect water reacting with organic material that has not been carefully removed by filtration or other means (cf. https://doi.org/10.1080/15287390252807957 and https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/wash-documents/wash-chemicals/trihalomethanes.pdf)

@johncarlosbaez very interesting, thanks for pulling that one up! It's wild that lidocaine actually works on plants that move. Indeed, the inhalational anesthetics are poorly understood with respect to their mechanism of action, but we at least know that their being lipophilic (i.e., how well they dissolve in fats and other non-aqueous media) correlates well with their potency.

@johncarlosbaez in fact, there has been some research on "plant nervous systems", in that even though plants do not have full-blown neurons like animals do, they display traits like depolarization waves, neurotransmitter analogues, etc.; see for instance the work of Brenner et al. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2006.06.009) and Sibaoka (https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02493405). On that note, I wonder if these anesthetics would also influence the drooping of Mimosa pudica:

@AmenZwa I am sure Acton knew what he was doing when he picked that book title. (In fact, in the original edition of the book, the title was ostensibly just "Numerical Methods That Work", and the "Usually" was in a faded shade of gray, like he was trying to sneak it in.)

Some artwork I did a few years ago.

#mathart

@ZachWeinersmith what if I am exactly at that point where A2, A3, B2, and B3 overlap?

@johncarlosbaez I wonder if one might be able to use a percolation model to analyze this behavior...

@gregeganSF In cases like these, a retraction feels not unlike closing the barn door after the entire herd has already fled.

@robinhouston I sometimes get the feeling that the whole of Alpha is a collection of perfectly okay mathematical methods, held together by duct tape and baling wire. That said, I find that when they announced that ChatGPT can interface with Alpha some time back, it seemed like LLMs were the long-missing front end for Alpha.

@robinhouston @simontatham this is the one I remember quite well:

@infobeautiful for some of us folk, the "watch TV" is completely replaceable with "check social media/get sad" and "destroy body with food or alcohol", and not necessarily in the order I gave.

@pschwahn @johncarlosbaez (putting on my chemist's hat) drinking distilled water is completely fine (and the osmosis thing mentioned in another response is utter bunk; by the time it's gone down the hatch, it would have some stuff dissolved in it that makes it less hypotonic). It's just that distilled water doesn't really taste all that good; it's the dissolved minerals and gases that make water tasty. (Personally, I find it slightly bitter.)